Department Meeting, January 21, 2009

Today we're going to create our contribution to the Collage of Careers event that is scheduled to take place on May 19. Be sure to bring any materials with you that you want to use. We have a collection of words for our "wordle", courtesy of Grand Avenue's fifth graders.

A reminder that the deadline is approaching for the winter edition of LITE Bytes. Please send your contributions to me or post them yourselves on the litebytes wiki (http://litebytes.wikispaces.com/). If you decide to post your article, let me know so I can prepare it for viewing.

Elementary librarians may be interested in Lookybook, a web 2.0 tool for sharing favorite picture books.

K-12 Instructional Media Center has links to websites to help students with their research and teachers with their professional development.

If you haven't looked at the Library of Congress website lately, take a look at the Learning Page, replete with resources for teachers.

Take some time to look through the National Plan for Implementation of Standards for the 21st-Century Learner and Guidelines for the School Library Media Program, courtesy of AASL. Acronymed L4L (Learning for Life), this implementation plan was created to support states, school systems, and individual schools preparing to implement the Standards for the 21st-Century Learner. Forthcoming there will be guidelines for the school library media program.

Do you know about commoncraft, a free site for online video tutorials? I just watched one about RSS feeds and it cleared up any remaining confusion that lingered. Definitely worth a peek.

Leapfish is a new search engine with innovative features. Not quite the same as searchme (did you try it yet) but pretty powerful.

Follett Destiny

Mary and I are at a Follett Destiny user group meeting and we are learning!

We just made a change you might like. On the first screen of the catalog, students can search for Award Winners. In the field next to Search Award Winner, select New York. Then, place your cursor in the search box and hit enter. Voila! You will see the list of award winning titles your library holds, and I know you will be impressed.

You can also search for literary prize-winning titles. In the Search Award Winner field, scroll to the second choice, Literary Prizes, and in the bottom box, either leave it as "all" or select the prize you want to locate. Once again place your cursor in the search box, and hit the enter key.

We also made two discoveries. Well, actually one discovery and one reminder. Check out Library Bytes (no relation to our own LITE Bytes) and 23 Things.

Did you know you could add subjects to your Visual Search? Take a look at the high school library catalog, select Visual Search, and click on Famous People and then Barack Obama. If you're interested in learning how to do this, let Mary or me know. Alternatively, when you're logged on, you can go to help and do a search for Visual Search.

One more tip. When you're in help, you can do a search for "Quick" and you'll get a list of all the tipsheets that are available.